Indeed, with the new technology, a single transceiver channel with all accompanying optical and electrical circuitry occupies only 0.5mm2.

The development will provide a big boost to the company's Exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations — an Exaflop — in a single second. That would make it around a thousand times faster than the fastest machine today.

"The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality," says Dr TC Chen, IBM's vice president of science and technology.

"With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality."

The silicon transistors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices, meaning the new technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line, without new or special tooling.

To make this possible, researchers developed a suite of integrated active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit – the smallest size that dielectric optics can reach.